In Seattle, the trial of Naveed Haq, accused of a gun attack at the Jewish Federation two years ago in which one woman was killed and five other people wounded, has got under way. Prosecutors said that Haq, 32, was not insane but had a deliberate plan to make a blood-soaked political point.
Haq, has pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to charges of murder and attempted murder in the July 2006 attack. If convicted, he faces life in prison without the possibility of parole. Prosecutor Erin Ehlert said Haq had stalked through the office, shooting one victim after another, in one case reaching over a cubicle wall before pulling the trigger. She said he had chased Pamela Waechter toward an exit, killing her as she ran down the stairs. The prosecutor told jurors that Haq had carefully planned his attack, making four separate trips to gun shops and using the Internet to map the 227-mile trip from his parents' home to the Jewish Federation offices in Seattle. "He thought about what he did. He planned what he did," she said.
John Carpenter, Haq's defense lawyer, called the shooting "the acts of a madman" and said they did not come “from a darkened heart, but from a diseased mind." Carpenter said the defense would present volumes of mental health files, showing Haq's bipolar schizophrenic and psychotic tendencies, including grandiose thoughts, hearing voices from walls and paranoid delusions.
